Columnist tears into GOP's 'shower thought' plan for massive federal spending slash

President-elect Donald Trump intends to empower two loyalists to cut out large swaths of federal government expenditure, but a new analysis finds their plans are sorely lacking. Ramaswamy has suggested firing any federal employee whose Social Security number ends in an odd number — which he said would result in an immediate 50 percent reduction — and then cutting any remaining employees whose Social Security number starts in an even number, which Bump said was ludicrous and unworkable. "To demonstrate the extent to which Ramaswamy doesn’t know what he’s talking about, just consider that last part, about axing half of the half of the remaining federal workforce by picking out the first digit of their Social Security numbers," Bump wrote, pointing out that the first digits in a Social Security number correlate to the region where the number was issued. "Since federal employees are not evenly distributed around the country, Ramaswamy’s shower-thoughts plan would not evenly reduce the number of federal workers." "Let's step back for a moment and note that even Ramaswamy's ideally random 75 percent reduction in federal employment would not be a shrug-it-off shift," Bump wrote.